A landmark 1960s study of British factory workers interviewed 847 men but largely ignored what their wives said and erased all mention of race and immigration. This matters because *The Affluent Worker* remains a foundational text in sociology, yet its conclusions about class and political attitudes were built on incomplete data. The original researchers did not analyse how racism, empire, or gender shaped the identities and views of the people they interviewed, even as Britain’s society was being transformed by immigration and changing gender roles. A preliminary reanalysis of 12% of the archived interviews has already revealed striking omissions—workers discussed race and immigration extensively, and wives offered perspectives that were never included in the published findings. If this project succeeds, it will produce two lasting changes. First, a fresh analysis will correct the historical record, showing how class, race, and gender actually intersected in 1960s Britain. Second, the entire corpus of interview documents and researchers’ notes will be fully digitised and made freely available to other scholars, local libraries, and historical societies in Luton and Cambridge. This is primarily fundamental social science—it will not change a manufacturing process or a supply chain—but it will reshape how sociologists understand a classic study, and it may inform present-day debates about class, race, and inequality by revealing how those forces operated in a period often seen as a baseline for modern Britain.
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This secondary data analysis initiative project will reanalyse and reinvigorate data from The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Goldthorpe et al, 1967, 1968a, 1968b & 1969), a highly influential classic sociological study which set out to understand the changing nature of working class identity and political attitudes in 1960s Britain. The original research team carried out some 847 interviews, mainly with male workers in the car manufacturing industries of Luton and Cambridge, as well as a series of home interviews whereby the men were interviewed alongside their wives. Remarkably given the changing nature of Britain in the 1960s in terms of racism, gender relations, and social class inequality and their intersections, race and gender do not feature in the original write-up of the study and are largely absent from subsequent critiques involving small-scale reanalyses (e.g. Savage, 2005a; Lawrence, 2014) or replication studies (e.g. Devine, 1992). Funded by a Durham University Seedcorn Grant, we analysed 12% of the archived interview materials. In doing so, we discovered a number of striking omissions in the original data analysis pertaining to the ways in which matters of race, immigration, empire and racism shaped the interviewee's identities and political attitudes, as well as insights into the perspectives of women gleaned from the until-now neglected contributions of the "workers wives" to interviews conducted in the home. A major objective of this SDAI project, therefore, is to reanalyse the entire corpus of interview data from The Affluent Worker study in a way that is attentive to these omissions. Given its status as a sociological classic, it is also astonishing that the data originally collected and wider study documentation is currently only available to secondary analysts in archived paper form, with only a small fraction having been rudimentarily digitised and reanalysed by subsequent researchers (Haaker, forthcoming). A second major objective of this SDAI project, therefore, is to reinvigorate The Affluent Worker study by subcontracting with the University of Essex Special Collections team based at the UK Data Service to digitise the entire corpus of interview documents and related paradata including researchers' notes and supplementary study materials, thus making the original study data accessible to the wider research community and the local communities in which this research was undertaken. The project will leave two legacies: 1) a fresh analysis of the original study materials with a novel focus on matters of race and gender, their intersection with class identities and class relations in 1960s Britain, and the resonances of this for the present day; and 2) a digitised version of the study materials that will be readily available in perpetuity to the wider research community, as well as the local communities in which this research was undertaken, including local libraries, archival collections and local history societies in Cambridge and Bedfordshire.
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